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Kanye West and the problematic of slavery

Black America is the proof of African presence in the Americas.
Through the presence of Africans, cultural elements of their heritage became the norm wherever they settled.
If one was to remove the black contribution to culture in America, what you would be left with is Australia.
It is the black community that gave America its universal appeal, in the cultural realm.
British youth sounding like American blacks created the Beatles, and the whole world identified with Muhammad Ali, because being a black American he incarnated an image the whole world could rally around. For Africans it is easy to recognize the civilizing power of African culture at work. Africa as a civilizing force must be acknowledged. Since ancient Egypt until today, Africa has seeded wisdom and civility.
When brutish and ignorant hords attacked Africa and started exploiting its natural and human resources, it also strategized a historical cover up.
To isolate Diaspora Africans from their continental brothers, they simply referred to exiled Africans by the name of “slaves”, and erased their cultural heritage and memory, increasingly replacing it by “slavery”.
So the term slavery is a big favorite of white academia. Challenging it can provoke deep reactions, all the way to the public sphere.
Malcom X dared challenge that language. According to him, prisoners of war is the right terminology. First it indicates that there was war. Secondly it shows that people did not lose sight of their African cultural roots.
American rapper and celebrity Kanye West put himself in the midst of controversy for questioning the historical accuracy of depicting the experience of Africans in America as ‘slavery’.
“Four hundred years…sounds like it’s a choice”, Kanye said.
A fury of comments followed the statement of the rapper on TMZ. Was it an intentional provocation, made to stir controversy and attract following, or was it a poorly formulated yet candid question on the framing of a complex historical context in over simplified and over used terminology ? From Africa what we are waiting to hear from our American brothers is a true realistic knowledgeable statements about Africa. Not a fictitious Africa like in the movie Black Panther, but the true earthly home of their cultural heritage.
As we do not in Africa need American ideologues, because we have our own elders and wise people, poets, singers, authors, and thinkers of all sorts coming out of our own ranks- we do not need to judge, just observe what is going on in America, generally. Even super stars cannot bring themselves to say, often enough, the word that would solve all this confusion, and open up the real discussion : Africa.
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